Reading Does Make For An Outstanding CEO

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By DR TOMMY WEIR

Let me know what you’re reading and I’ll let you know what kind of leader you are.

Well, I may not really have the psychic ability to accurately make that predication, but the books you read and the people you meet will determine where you’ll be in five years.

This thought was programmed into my brain by Dr Towns while I was an undergraduate student.

Successful people love to read

Reading is part of the lives of the world’s richest and most successful people. Leading chief executive officers (CEOs) acknowledge reading as a differentiator in the crowded climb to the top.

“Successful men, in all callings, never stop acquiring specialised knowledge related to their major purpose, business or profession,” wrote Steve Siebold in his book How Rich People Think.

Based upon a quarter century of interviews with millionaires, he concluded: “Those who are not successful usually make the mistake of believing that the knowledge-acquiring period ends when one finishes school.”

Self-education

However, the successful have a pastime in common: They self-educate by reading.

Rather than deciding that the learning period of life is over, they accurately attest that learning is life, and there is no better way to acquire knowledge than from the printed page (or e-format).

Walk into a top executive’s home and one of the first things you’ll see is an extensive library of books.

Typically, the library is very personal and a closely guarded part of their lives where it’s rare to be invited in. For example, only a few Nike colleagues ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight.

To enter the room behind his formal office, one had to remove his shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate; the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry was greater than any the self-effacing Knight demanded for himself.

A common theme among most of the world’s top leaders is that almost everything they read becomes useful to them, including science, poetry, politics and novels.

They have a lifelong interest in learning, and it doesn’t stop when university is over.

Until the legendary Steve Jobs sold his collection, it remained a secret to most of the world.

He reportedly had an ‘inexhaustible interest’ in the books of William Blake – the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. Although his thirst for knowledge was in secret, it does not lessen its reality.

I’ll never forget being invited into one of those libraries; we spent an hour perusing the CEO’s 20,000 books.

I was like a child in a candy shop and mesmerised by what he read and how his growth was his private priority.